Throwing Out the Script

Hi, my name is skoutz, and I’m a control freak.

 

I am well aware many of you are chuckling as you read this, because you are very familiar with this issue in my life. A couple years ago I realized one of the ways this desire for control manifested in my life was in conversations with other people. I love to play out conversations, especially difficult ones, in my head, imagining every possible way a conversation could go. I do this because I hate surprises. I hate surprises because I can’t be prepared for them. I can’t prepare how I am going to respond. I can’t control the emotions or thoughts I may have in that moment of surprise. So I write scripts in my head for conversations.

Now this isn’t always a bad thing. There is great value in thinking through your thoughts and how to best articulate them before you go into a conversation. The problem is when you start to decide what the other person or people will say as well. Instead of actually having conversations, I found myself deciding how people would respond and continuing on with that assumption. When I discovered this I started being very intentional about not having conversations for other people.

For the most part, I was getting much better at actually talking with people, but one of the things I learned this school year is that I still had scripts I was writing. There were topics that needed to be discussed, and I had written a script for every response imaginable. I was shocked to discover I was having a lot of conversations where my scripts were useless. Fortunately, most of these conversations went far better than I could ever imagine, but I was still trying to control them. I was still holding on to these scripts.

Over the course of this semester, I’ve been striving to not waste time and energy on preparing for a bunch of what ifs that will rarely happen. I’m throwing out the scripts!